10 jobs robots already do better than you

Outsourcing these tasks may free up humans for more rewarding work

In several Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN, -0.11%
warehouses this holiday season, your holiday packages will be moved from the shelves to the staff not by people, but by robots. Amazon’s new “robot army”—a fleet of short, bright orange robots on wheels—is now working in some of its warehouses to move stocked shelves to workers, who then scan them. This robot army makes Amazon’s operations more efficient: Workers are now expected to be able to scan at least 300 items per hour vs. 100 when the robot army wasn’t in use and will now avoid up to 20 miles of walking each day.

Bloomberg

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2. Bartender

Hop on board Royal Caribbean’s Quantum of the Seas ship and, starting this week, your fruity cocktail may be served by none other than a dancing robot; the cruise line has added two of these strange contraptions—named the N1-C and the B1-O—to its new ship.

What’s more, you may even be able to find one of these contraptions on dry land: While your local bartender may fumble when you ask him for a Sex on the Beach or a Tight Twister, the Monsieur robot bartender, who knows 300 cocktails and can make them in seconds, won't. (You can see it at work in this video.) And should you not know what you want, you can pick a theme like “bachelorette party” or “Irish pub,” and the robot will offer up some 20 to 25 drink selections for you to pick from. The manufacturer is selling the product to both businesses and consumers—the robots retail for $5,000; just don’t expect it to fully replace your local bartender anytime soon—the patrons need someone to cry to.

AFP/Getty Images

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3. Soldier

Robots could replace one-fourth of all U.S. combat soldiers by 2030, according to statements made in January by U.S. Army Gen. Robert Cone. It’s an effort by the U.S. Army to become “a smaller, more lethal, deployable and agile force.” The robots may be able to do everything from dismantling land mines to engaging in front-line combat.

(Image: U.S. Army soldiers unload a robot to deactivate an IED they discovered on a main road in Yosef Khel district of Paktika province on April 2, 2010.)

UCSF

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4. Pharmacist

At the pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco, it isn’t a human who fills the prescriptions—it’s a robot. Computers receive the prescriptions and robots package and dispense them. During its first phase-in, the university says, there were no errors in the 350,000 doses the robot filled. What’s more, robots may be able to do a better job than humans at making sure the prescription a human is picking up won’t interact with other medications he or she is taking, says professor Erik Brynjolfsson, director of MIT’s Center for Digital Business.

(Image: The RIVA machine in pharmaceutical services)

AFP/Getty Images

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5. Farmer

Much of farming involves routine tasks that robots can more efficiently do, including surveying the land, driving the tractors, and cutting, pruning and harvesting the crops, says IBISWorld industry analyst Jeremy Edwards. Indeed, there are already wine-bots, which prune vines in vineyards, and lettuce-bots, which pull up the weeds near the base of the plant, among many other farming robots.

(Image: A picture taken on Sept. 13, 2012, near Chalon-sur-Saone, shows the Wall-Ye V.I.N. robot being used in vineyards. The robot, brainchild of these two Burgundy-based inventors, Christophe Millot and Guy Julien, is one of the robots being developed around the world aimed at vineyards struggling to find the labor they need.)

AFP/Getty Images

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6. Bomb squad

There are more than 450 bomb squads in America, which respond to thousands of bomb-related incidents each year, according to federal statistics. Already, some of these bomb squads use robots, which often can better dispose of the bombs, while minimizing the risk to human lives. The robots have other law enforcement applications as well—like infiltrating hostage situations—says Colin Angle, iRobot CEO and co-Founder of iRobot, maker of the Roomba robot vacuum.

(Image: A wheeled robot with various sensors from the Union County bomb squad checks a simulated suspect vehicle during a terrorism-response exercise coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security at Kean College in Hillside, N.J.)

Shutterstock.com

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7. Journalist

Fellow journalists, don’t hate the messenger. Robots will likely take some journalists’ jobs in the near future. Brynjolfsoon says that business journalists—especially those who focus on numbers-heavy stories like market reports—and sports journalists who do a lot of numbers analysis—may be most at risk. Indeed, a program by Narrative Science already writes short sports recaps (The Big Ten Network is a client). Brynjolfsson points out, however, that robots aren’t that great at being creative—so fiction writers and long-form creative journalists can rest easy.

Getty Images

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8. Housekeeper

The vacuuming robot has been around for a while, but it’s getting better than ever: The Roomba 880, a newer version of the floor-cleaning robot, has earned stellar reviews, with some testers saying it does a better job than any upright vacuum, especially on pet hair. The company who makes the Roomba, iRobot, also makes the Scooba 450, which scrubs the floors, as well as a sweeping and gutter-cleaning robot. iRobot says it is has sold more than 10 million home robots alone.

(Image: The Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner by iRobot, as shown at the International Robots and Vision Show June 4, 2003, in Rosemont, Ill.)

Shutterstock.com

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9. Paralegals and doc-review-focused attorneys

Clients pay millions for attorneys and paralegals to do some of the work that robots can simply do better—namely the dreaded “doc review,” in which people search hundreds of documents looking for mentions of certain items or concepts. Silicon Valley-based Blackstone Discovery offers that service—it can search both words and concepts—without the need for human hours. Robots, unlike humans, don’t tire of rote tasks such as this, and thus are often better equipped for it, experts say.

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10. Tellers and clerks

The bank branch is expensive to maintain, thanks in part to the cost of bank tellers’ labor—a cost that robots can, and in some cases already do, help eliminate. At least one bank is trying to drastically reduce that cost: At more than a dozen Coastal Federal Credit Union branches, consumers won’t find a single bank teller when they walk into a branch; instead, they’ll find “personal teller machines” that do much of what the teller could. The move resulted in a 40% reduction in teller staff, a spokesperson for the bank said earlier this year. Other banks are experimenting with similar options, says Better ATM Services CEO Todd Nuttall, whose company enables ATMs to dispense prepaid gift cards. The store and mailroom clerk may also find their employment opportunities similarly downsized.

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